Establishment of environmental impact assessment index system on agricultural planning

Abstract: Environmental impact assessment (EIA) on agricultural planning is one of the important measures, which can control the agricultural environmental pollution such as soil erosion, soil salinization, fertilizer pollution, and agricultural wastes at the headstream, and harmonize agricultural economic growth and agro-ecological environment to realize agricultural sustainable development. According to the "Environmental Impact Assessment Law of People's Republic of China", it is required that EIA should be conducted on agricultural planning. However, EIA is still at its beginning stage of exploration and summarizing experience in China, because of its wide assessment scale and the comprehensive evaluation methods, especially the index system, which is more complex than that in other industries. The absence of index system is the dominating obstacle to develop the steps and methods of EIA on agricultural planning at present. In order to implement the EIA on agricultural planning effectively, the development situation and existing problems of agricultural planning EIA were concluded firstly in this paper based on the domestic and foreign researches results. Through the analysis on theory and material example, the result showed that the agricultural planning at county level was the most, which almost accounted for 45% of the total agricultural planning. County-level government always takes charge of the implementation of the EIA on agricultural planning. It is suggested that EIA on agricultural planning at county level should be included in the assessment scale at present in China. Secondly, the existing evaluation indicators in public documents and other researches were also systematically summarized and studied. The result showed that the evaluation indicators were various and in great number (more than 150). Some of the indicators were not representative and had low practicability. It was required that the key evaluation indicators should be selected scientifically and precisely. Therefore, thirdly, the theory of strategic environmental impact assessment, the prior planning in China, and the characteristics of agricultural resources and environment were studied in this paper, as well as the identification of agro-environmental impact. With the methods of the basic indicator mode, expert consultation and example demonstration, the index systems of EIA on planting industry and animal husbandry planning were determined. Generally, indicator layer mainly contained 14 and 9 specific sub-indicators for planting industry EIA and animal husbandry planning EIA, respectively. The indicator system contained environmental, resource, ecological and social aspects, after surveying the characteristics of physical and sociological environments. Lastly, some suggestions for the development of EIA on agricultural planning were proposed in this paper. The wrong viewpoints that "agricultural activities do not cause environmental pollution" and "EIA on agricultural planning has no substantive effect" must be abandoned and corrected in today's China. The legal status of EIA on agricultural planning must be elevated by strengthening the supervision of the relevant laws and normalizing assessment procedure. Meanwhile, trace evaluation must be strengthened due to the hysteresis and cumulative effects of the environmental impact caused by agricultural activity. Furthermore, it is necessary that the index systems of EIA on other agricultural industry such as leisure agriculture should be made in the further research.